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_. GRE SHAM COLLEGE - PREMIERSHIP , Lecture 6 ‘SHADOW AND SUBSTANCE’: PREMIERSHIP FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY by PROFESSOR PETER HE~ESSY BA PhD Gresham Professor of Rhetoric 5 March 1996 GRESHM COLLEGE RHETORIC LECTURES, 1995-96. ‘PREMIERSHIP’ PETER HENNESSY, GRESHM PROFESSOR OF RHETORIC LECTURE SIX: 5 WCH 1996 ‘“SHADOM AND SUBSTANCE”: PREMIERSHIP FOR THE WENTY-FIRST CENTURY.’ This may strike you as very odd, but, when, in the historical sense, you’ve spent as much time in the company of past premiers as I have while preparing this year’s series of lectures, you become rather sorry for them as a breed almost to the point of agreeing with Stanley Baldwin that: ‘There are three classes which need sanctuary more than others – birds, wild flowers and Prime Ministers.’lWhy is this? Partly because as Lord Hailsham has described, they rarely die happy. (’1 mean it doesn’t lead to happiness’, was how he put it when asked if he regretted that the prize had not fallen into his lap in October 19632);and partly because I tend to subscribe to what one might call ‘Enoch’s Law of Politics’ which the singular Mr Powell advanced in a fond treatment of ‘Rab’ Butler’s career. ‘In politics of all callings’, he wrote, ‘the test of success or failure is so unsure that one is tempted to wonder whether there is such a thing as true political success at all: failure, or frustration, or reversal, seems so much to be the essence of any political career.’3 I am sure this is especially true of those who fill the premiership. To reach the single most powerful public and political position in the land and yet, inevitably, to discover in one’s declining years that one’s impact on such a torpid, traditional in many ways apolitical society as ours can only lend itself to a succession of broody might-have-beens left festering in the mind of the once mighty. That, I suspect, is what Lord Hailsham had in mind about the lack of contentment among the Honorable Society of Ex-Premiers (Though I suspect Clem Attleeand Alec Home were free of this incubus. They both spent their Iast years painfully missing their wives who pre-deceased them but that is a very different kind of affliction). 1 But I have not stood up before you today to break-open phials of soothing ointment over the bruised egos of old statesmen. There was nothing compulsory or obligatory about their wielding authority over their Cabinet, their party, our Parliament, and, by extens on, over us. For another part of me is in tune with at least the first half of another Baldwinism– ‘Never complain and never explain.’4 My purpose in the final lecture of this year’s series is to look at the demands upon the office of Prime Minister and those who fi11 t as the century turns. And I approach this task in a very tentative spirit. Not for me the easy, almost casual certainty of the inventor of the pillar box and political novelist supreme, Anthony Trollope, who, through the mouth of the Duke of St Bungay declared: ‘One wants in a Prime Minister a good many things, but not very great things. He should be clever but need not be a genius; he should be conscientious but by no means strait-laced; he should be cautious but never timid; bold but never venturesome; he should have a good digestion, genial manners, and, above all a thick skin.’s Late twentieth century Britain is very different from mid to late nineteenth when, in Trollope’s fictional characterisation at least, ‘the most moving sources of our national excitement seemed to have vanished from life’ yet ‘the Government was carried on and the country was prosperous.’6 For all the vicissitudes experienced by our country since relative decline began to span the polished carapace of our nineteenth century military and industrial $uperpowerdom, it is still difficult to arouse a genuine or a widespread concern about what Disraeli called ‘the condition of the people’7 in not so much the social, but in the wider, political, governmental and institutionalsense. Richard Hoggart captured this paradox quite marvelously last year when he wrote: 2 — What an extraordinary feat it is that the British can so easily assume so much continuity and security; on the one hand, a feat Of sleep walking; on the other founded in a near reality, in the assertion that order will survive. We had a civil war three centuries ago; some major centres of population were badly bombed in the last war, and there have since been some temporary and local breakdowns of order. There can be no suitable comparisons here with, say, Belgium or France or many another West and East European nation. No Holocaust, no Balkan-style disturbances...no ethnic cleansing.’s All true though I would add \don’t forget Northern Ireland after 1969’. And yet complacency should not be the condition of the political nation in 1996. A Duke of Omniumor a Trollopian style of premiership simply does not fit the bill today and it has not for a very long time past, though Churchill might have been thought to be attempting it during his second and last spell in No.1O with his initial taste for ‘overlord’ ministers and that distinct flavour of ‘pageantry’ which Roy Jenkins detected in the old man’s singular way of conducting the premiership.g One must be careful, however, not to let style overlay or camouflage substance. There was something relentless about the increasing workload of British Prime Ministers as the postwar period deepened. In last year’s Gresham series I examined the almost india rubber stretching of the scope and reach of the office of Prime Minister as illustrated by an analysis of the functions of the job carried out by the Cabinet Office, the Treasury and No.1O between 1947 and 1949 in Mr Attlee’s time’”and by me, unofficially, in 1995 in the absence of any internal Whitehall replica of the late 1940s exercise.11 I hope you’ll forgive me if I reprise the findings of my efforts before offering a set of new and different-but-related measurements to illustrate what one might call the phenomenon of creeping-overload-at-the-top. From a dozen prime ministerial functions identified by William Armstrong and his colleagues in the late 1940s12(though, had I been consulted, I would have 3 added a further seven13),the total, by my reckoning, had increased to 33 in themid-1990s, a figure which, like its late Forties precursor, excluded party as opposed to governmental duties. A breakdown of the 1995 audit shows: seven constitutional and procedural finctions; sixdealingwith appointments; sixdealingwith the conductor Cabinet andparliamentary business; seven touching organisational and efficiency questions; two concerning sensitive Budget andmarket-related matters; roundedoffby five special foreign and defencefinctions. Range of activity is one thing, frequency however, is quite another. And here what actually passed over prime ministerial desks is the next puzzle to be pondered and its key lies in the Public Record Office, at least for the period up to and including-1965-. Mercifully, the PRO has allocated special classes for Prime Ministers’ papers in the postwar period - PREM8 for Attlee; PREM 11 for the four Conservative Prime Ministers between 1951 and 1964; and PREM 13 for Wilson after 1964. , Culling and categorizing them has proved to be a revealing and fascinating exercise but, before exposing the results, I must come clean about its crudities. These are of two main kinds: not every file that crossed the PM’s desk is to be found within the bounds of the PREM classes. Some of them lie scattered across various Cabinet office series; the intelligencematerial, an occasional mistake apart, has been stripped from the PREM series for the postwar period leaving no trace, for example, of the regular flowof so-called ‘CX’ reports from the Secret Intelligence Service.14 Secondly, mY ctitegorisationsof files by type are necessarily imperfect. For example, sometimes material dealing with atomic weapons is best placed under the headingof ‘Defence’.At other times it fits more accurately under the caption ‘Foreign Policy (USA).’ Others, too, might have chosen a different varietyof labels to pick from. Anyway, here iS the result. Let’s take first Mr Attlee’s tally for 1948 (see Table I). TA8LE 1 PRIME MINISTER’S OFFICE: PAPERS AND CORRESPONDENCE (INDIVIDUAL FILES) CLEMENT ATTLEE 1948 1: Imperial/Commonwealth 54 2: Economic/Industrial/Regulatory 42 3: Defence 39 4: Foreign Policy (excluding USA & Middle East) 26 5: Whitehall/Ministerial/ Constitutional/Parliamentary 18 6: Domestic Policy 14 7: Security/Intelligence 5 8-.-. Foreign Policy (USA) 4 8=: Foreign Policy (Middle East) 4 8.=. Monarchy 4 11=.. Trades Unions/Strikes/Pay 2 11=: Ireland (excluding NI) 2 13: Party Matters (Labour) 1 TOTAL 21515 5 I chose 1948 as the year to measure because the comparisons I am about to make are, relatively speaking, for peacetime years and I wanted to move beyond the immediate shadow of World War II, some of whose unfinished business might have produced an abnormal workload. Distortions there are, of course, in 1948. For example, the leading category by volume, Imperial/Commonwealth,is distended by the transferor power in the sub-continent. India accounts for 25 of those 54 items. Apart from the overall total of 215 files (some of which, as with all the twelve-months surveyed, ran-on from previous years), what is striking is the preponderance of foreign, defence and imperial concerns as an absorber of prime ministerial time.